Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

COLOMBIAN COCAINE CARTELS • 111On 17 November 1984 CERF assassinated the security supervisor ofthe U.S. embassy, who was a Salvadoran national. On 7 March 1985CERF shot and killed Lieutenant Colonel Ricardo Cienfuegos, chiefSalvadoran military spokesman, at a downtown San Salvador healthclub. On 23 March 1985 CERF followed up with the assassinationof General José Alberto Medrano, founder of ORDEN and patron ofextreme right-wing groups and politicians.On 19 June 1985 the Central American Workers’ RevolutionaryParty, a member group of the FMLN, publicly machine-gunnedoff-duty U.S. Marines and other patrons sitting in a sidewalk café inthe Zona Rosa district, killing four and wounding nine others. TheSalvadoran government responded with intensive counterterrorismoperations that, in addition to capturing the responsible culprits,crippled but did not totally destroy CERF. Until the end of the Salvadoranconflict on 1 January 1992, CERF struggled to rebuild itselfthrough recruitment efforts among university students, but with theend of the conflict this group was disbanded.CNN SYNDROME. Sometimes shorted to “CNN-drome,” the term refersto the Atlanta-based Cable News Network (CNN) channel, whichrevolutionized news coverage by having 24-hour satellite and cablefednews. This term was coined by Lieutenant Colonel David Bradford(USAF) to identify the effect of instant coverage of provocative majornews events, such as terrorist attacks, in stampeding decision makersand the public into reactive statements and actions. Insofar as terroristsseek to exploit media coverage of their actions to pressure governmentsthrough psychological manipulation of the targeted audiencesthat are following the news as it unfolds, the CNN effect becomes aforce multiplier, greatly magnifying the impact of terrorism. It alsohas the unfortunate effect of driving public opinion and policy makersinto reacting before a careful marshaling and analysis of evidence canbe completed. Thus, the chance remark by a person interviewed nearthe Oklahoma City bombing site that he had seen “a Middle Eastern–looking man” driving away from the scene of the bombing promptedboth a flurry of false news media leads about purported Muslim orMiddle Eastern terrorists and also a regrettable wave of anti-Arab andanti-Muslim bigotry and hostility among many Americans.COLOMBIAN COCAINE CARTELS. These criminal syndicates areconsidered terrorist threats for at least three reasons. First, they are